


The Black Blood

by The_Exile



Series: Skure Crisis [2]
Category: Phantasy Star (Video Games)
Genre: Deviates From Canon, Gen, Gore, Speculation, Spoilers, zombie rabbits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-28
Updated: 2013-12-28
Packaged: 2018-01-06 11:56:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1106530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The rabbits came back again today... Phantasy Star II fic set among the survivors on Dezolis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Black Blood

The rabbits came back again today.

I hate the rabbits. They freak me out, they sneak up on you in large packs, they'll kill you if they get you surrounded and you can't even eat them or skin them if you do manage to put them down before they tear you to pieces. Once you finally get them to stop moving, they're just rotting corpses again, the same as any other rabbit that's been dead for several weeks and didn't decide to get up and start eating anything that moves. Not that they'll die unless you set fire to them or chop them up into such tiny pieces there wouldn't be enough left to skin. Anything less and they'll just stand up again. 

Maybe I'm being a little hypocritical there. But at least I don't have glowing red eyes and wander around with my flesh rotting and my entrails hanging out, hiding in the snow and leaping out at anything that looks vaguely like food.

The rabbits wounded me and reminded me that I was nearly out of monomate, so I went down into the town. Aukba isn't exactly the seat of civilisation, with its population of Laconia miners and merchants who weren't in Skure when the shuttle left, seedy aliens (Okay, seedy natives; we're the aliens.) and the obligatory Data Memory, Clone Lab and Teleport girls (You've got to hand it to them, they're pretty dedicated to stick around in an abandoned colony on an alien planet with a zombie rabbit plague just to keep a few hundred people at most alive.). Still, it's the nearest Dezolis has to a trade hub that the Dezolisian natives will actually let us go anywhere near. 

There's those other people, but I don't think anyone else knows about them but me, and I don't think they're all that interested in trade. They don't like me telling anyone about them at all. 

The locals all glared at me when they saw me. They still think I'm carrying the plague, or that I'm going to start rotting away and then turn psycho one day, like the rabbits. I almost wish it was that simple. They let me buy supplies, though, and accept the Eletusk pelts and Owltalon feathers I use for bartering, once they'd checked them thoroughly for signs of zombie rabbit plague. The Data Memory girl didn't care either way, she just says she's been sent into worse situations - hell, she escaped from Skure! - and the doctor has theories of his own about what's happened to me. 

A genetic mutation, he explained to me when I came in for a quick check-up. You can't catch the virus through rabbit bites but they carry all sorts of other nasty infections and they're usually very deep wounds. The Clone Lab technicians discovered it when they were trying to back up my DNA records through what they've salvaged from Data Memory. At first they thought my files were corrupted, and that's why I've been losing them lately, not because Motherbrain deletes records from Dezolis these days to keep the extent of the emergency from becoming public knowledge, or the opinions of the cynical bastards here from being voiced in any official capacity. Then they ran it through the medical labs and they found some interesting results.

The 'zombie rabbit plague' isn't really a plague. It's a mutation caused by poison gas from a vent that got opened up in the mines. The gas dispersed once it reached open ground but it killed everyone in the mines, and everyone in the space port that was connected to the mines, and then the mutated animals killed everyone else. Only the animals went berserk and only the rabbits started rotting away but not dying. The cats were perfectly fine; I've got a pet cat of my own that I'm teaching to hunt rabbits. Palmans and Motavians just straight died from contact with the gas.

Except me.

I've taken five injuries so far that should have outright killed me. I've been trapped in the caves without food and water for twice as long as I should have survived for. I've survived being stuck under a snowdrift in Dezolisian mid-winter. I know for a fact that I took a large enough dose of the poison gas to kill me back there. I've lost the ability to die. I don't know why I even bother with the Clone Lab and Data Memory. What's there to back up that's ever going to go away? Mostly I come in for their benefit, so they can keep trying to get their services up and running properly. They're experimenting with a private server, disconnected from Motherbrain, but they lack the resources to run it and a lot of their customers have given up trying, maybe given up on having a normal life at all.

I'm digressing. I can't die. I haven't been able to since I was down the mine during the disaster. A stable, Palman-transmittable form of the virus, the doctor's calling it. He keeps trying to reproduce it but there's no way anyone's going to volunteer to be injected with it, even with promises of immortality. I sometimes wonder if that's what the 'poison gas' was in the first place; some idiot scientist trying to cure death. The things I've seen Motherbrain to capable of – abandoning people on Dezolis, deleting their data and clone samples – I wouldn't be surprised if She'd been experimenting on us.

Or maybe there's another explanation. One that's nothing to do with poison gas or rabbits, and more to do with the things I know, the things I've been in contact with while I wandered through the underground caverns, failing to die, that I really shouldn't.

After all, I'm not the only immortal on Dezolis.


End file.
